This invention relates to processing data from meteorological radars and in particular to a method and apparatus for de-aliasing Doppler velocity data in a weather radar system in real time.
Pulsed Doppler weather radars have inherent range and velocity ambiguities due to system design factors such as pulse repetition rate and radar frequency. These ambiguities are related by the following relationship: EQU R (VN)=C (lambda/8)
where R is the unambiguous range, VN is the unambiguous (Nyquist) velocity, C is the speed of light and lambda is the radar wavelength. This relationship can be rewritten for VN by substituting for maximum unambiguous range the equation R=C (T/2) to yield: EQU VN=.+-.lambda/4T,
where T is the pulse repetition interval. Doppler velocity aliasing occurs when the magnitude of the radial component of the target's velocity is greater than VN.
The interpretation and automatic data processing of Doppler weather radar data is complicated by the range and velocity ambiguities. These ambiguities can distort the information making interpretation difficult. Such ambiguities also yield false alarms in automatic detection algorithms, increasing false alarm rates and obscuring signatures that decrease the probability of detection of severe weather events. Weather radar systems require that the velocity data be properly de-aliased. Thus it is critical that the method of velocity de-aliasing can keep up with a real time data collection rate.
In the past, several methods have been developed to de-alias Doppler velocities. In a publication entitled "Extension of Maximum Unambiguous Doppler Velocity By Use Of Two Sampling Rates", Amer. Meteor. Soc., Boston, 1976, pp. 23-26, a method of using dual PRFs to de-alias velocity data is discussed. This technique discusses the use of alternating PRFs from pulse to pulse to de-alias data. This technique was never implemented in an operational radar because of problems in changing the transmitter PRF from pulse to pulse. The simplest approach to de-alias velocity data is to apply continuity along the radar radial. This method compares the measured velocity at each range gate with its neighbor and either adds or subtracts an integer number of VN until the difference between the adjacent range gates is within some allowable difference. In a publication entitled "Interactive Radar Velocity Unfolding" by D.W. Bargan and R. Brown, 19th Conference on Radar Meteorology, Amer. Meteor. Soc., Boston, 1980, pp. 278-283, a method is described that uses continuity and the average of the preceeding velocities to de-alias the current range gate. However, this method also depended on operator interaction to de-alias the velocity data, and hence it is not suitable for real time applications. In another publication entitled "Automatic Velocity De-aliasing for Real Time Applications", by M.W. Merrit, 22nd Conference on Radar Meteorology, Amer. Meteor. Soc., Boston, 1984, pp. 528-533, a method is described that utilizes a two-dimensional Windfield Model to de-alias the data. This method comprised a multiple step process that groups data into regions of similar velocities where all the velocity data in that region do not differ from one another by more than the Nyquist velocity. The difference between velocities on the edges of these regions were minimized by determining the proper Nyquist interval for each region. The final step uses the Windfield Model to determine the proper velocity for the velocities within the regions. This method was never run in real time and is subject to failure scenario in regions of strong velocity gradients in which aliased data was grouped with regions of data that were not aliased. The Merritt technique was modified in a further publication entitled "Two and Three-Dimensional De-aliasing of Doppler Radar Velocities," by W.R. Bergen and S.C. Albers, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, Amer. Meteor. Soc., Boston, Vol. 5, pp. 305-319, which describes adding several preprocessing steps to eliminate noise and data anomalies that cause the technique to fail. This modified technique yields good results, but is not capable of running in real time; it takes 20-30 seconds to process a 360 degree scan (512 range gates) data on a VAX 8800. In another publication entitled "The Simple Rectification to Cartesian Space of Folded Radial Velocities from Doppler Radar Sampling", by Miller et al., Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, Vol. 3, American Meteorological Society (1986), a technique is described that de-aliases velocity data as part of a cartesian coordinate conversion process. This technique computed a velocity quality parameter to establish the reliability of the de-aliased velocity data. However, this technique does not run in real time and can potentially degrade data resolution.
Data contamination must be minimized prior to processing by a real time velocity de-aliasing method. Not only will contaminated data cause de-aliasing failures, but it can also cause the method to be too slow for a real time application. For these reasons several data quality checks such as ground clutter filtering, signal-to-noise thresholding, spectrum width thresholding, and reflectivity spike removal, should be performed on the data prior to the de-aliasing techniques.